"To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains greater mastery of the cultural tool that language is. Rather more than a year ago in Lyon, I remember, in a lecture I had drawn a parallel between the Negro and European poetry, and a French acquaintance told me enthusiastically, 'At the bottom you are a white man.' The fact that I had been able to investigate so interesting a problem through the white man's language gave me honorary citizenship" (38).
According to Fanon, speaking a language means you take on that specific world, and this act of taking on is interesting. When speaking a particular language, how much mastery can we have of its cultural or symbolic value when the language is being mediated through a different Self with a different, sometimes opposing cultural value? If a negro were to have complete mastery over the English language, how much power or 'whiteness' does he indeed possess when this language he speaks is juxtaposed by the visual image of what he is or who he is in relation to what he speaks?
So this leads us to yet another question.. In what lies the power or symbolic capital of a language we speak? Is its worth and value in the actual speaking of it by a person, or in its RECEPTION by another person?
I do not have an answer. But i do think that we can draw a distinction between when a language is merely spoken and when it is recieved and understood.
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Very interesting Chitra, yes, language only becomes language when we start ENGAGING with the other... I think at one point Fanon says that to speak is to exist irrevocably for the other. This is, of course, also where rules come in, and with rules, power and domination.
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